He became interested in the spot after his wife crashed there on a bike ride. It inspired him to set up a camera in his nearby office, recording more than 50 cyclist crashes in just two months of 2014. He released a video of these crashes recently along with the paper.

Chris Cherry and his wife.

“What happens is the bike wheel will fall into that flange, the crack between the rail and concrete,” said Cherry.

“I think one of the main problems is people don’t expect it, and they get blind-sided so to speak,” Cherry added.

Completed Improvements

The City of Knoxville has since improved the intersection 1-2 years ago, said Director of Engineering Jim Hagerman.

“We were hearing anecdotally that people were crashing here,” he said. The city accelerated the process once Cherry brought them the crash video.

Cherry’s team studied 13,247 cyclist crossings of the tracks on both sides of Neyland. They found a crash rate of 15.3 per 1,000 crossings on the shoulder, and 2.2 per 1,000 on the greenway itself.

A sign warning riders of the railroad crossing.

They found bikes on the shoulder were hitting the rails at about 10 degrees.